I own six linen shirts. I have worn precisely two of them in the past eighteen months, which tells you most of what you need to know about linen as a category and about me as a consumer.

The pitch is straightforward enough. Linen breathes, it drapes, it looks lived-in by lunchtime and considerably worse by four. Flax fibre is roughly 30% more moisture-absorbent than cotton, which is genuinely useful when the mercury clears 32 degrees and you are standing on a stone terrace pretending to enjoy an aperitivo you ordered by pointing.

Where men go wrong is the fit. The linen shirt is not a beach cover-up and it is not a business shirt that has given up. Cut it too generously and you become a soft furnishing; cut it too close and every crease reads as a mistake rather than a texture. The window is narrow, roughly a 4cm span across the chest measurement, and most men land outside it in one direction or the other.

Colour is the other trap. Navy linen looks superb in the shop and greyish-purple after eight washes, because linen takes dye badly and releases it enthusiastically. White, ecru and a genuinely mid-tone olive survive. Everything else is a rental agreement with a fabric that will eventually break the lease.

I have a rule about buttons, which is that mother-of-pearl on linen is a category error. The shirt is meant to look casual and the buttons are meant to agree with it. Corozo, horn, or plain matte plastic all work; anything that catches the light is arguing with the fabric.

The price question resolves itself faster than you would expect. Below about $120 the yarn is short-staple and pills within a season. Above about $400 you are buying a label, since the meaningful quality difference between a $250 Irish linen shirt and a $700 one is largely the shop it came from and the bag it left in.

Two shirts is the correct number. One in white for the evenings when you have committed to a restaurant with tablecloths, one in a colour you can defend in daylight. The other four in my wardrobe are a monument to optimism, purchased in three separate Februarys by a man who believed each time that this would be the summer he became someone who wore linen properly.